The Reformer Read online

  Maklakov understood this dynamic. In advocating advances in the rule of law, he regularly tried to build intellectual and social foundations for a law-based state. An example is his work shepherding a bill for equalization of peasant rights through the Duma in June 1916. An imperial decree issued in October 1906 had taken serious but incomplete steps toward such an equalization, and Maklakov’s bill had limited functions—turning the 1906 decree into a regular law and expanding it at the margins. But a persistent undercurrent of all issues relating to peasants was their widespread demand for the land of non-peasant landowners. In an effort to make the landowners see the benefits of admitting peasants to others’ ordinary civic rights, Maklakov argued that so long as peasants were not admitted to full legal rights, they were likely to persist in demanding others’ land.14

  Similarly, arguing for repeal of the Pale of Settlement that kept Jews almost entirely excluded from much of Russia, he noted that the government had put itself in a preposterous bind, using incoherent and exception-filled rules to balance the anti-Semitic purpose with some opportunity for the rest of the country to benefit from the Jewish community’s skills. He argued that because no civilized state could enforce the rules as written, they were an open invitation to bribery and corruption.15 Maklakov’s struggles for legislation were always grounded in a sense of how laws might fit—and reflect and nurture—citizens’ consciousness.

  Though Maklakov was a vocal and persistent avatar of the rule of law, his record was not unblemished. At the invitation of Prince Felix Yusupov, he played a role in the December 1916 plot to assassinate the shadowy religious figure Grigorii Rasputin. Though Maklakov’s role started with advising the conspirators against the project altogether and then against particularly risky approaches, he allowed himself to be sucked in to the point where, as he later acknowledged, he could have been found guilty as an accessory. Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps the sort of civic zeal that moved the most honorable of Caesar’s assassins? Perhaps a love of adventure, a raffish streak? After discussion of the issue in chapter 16, the reader will be able to speculate with more nuance.

  Maklakov’s efforts failed. But the failure is hardly shocking in view of the obstacles facing the rule of law in early twentieth-century Russia. The Romanov dynasty had ruled autocratically since 1613. It had occasionally assembled a zemski sobor, a gathering of politically weighty citizens loosely comparable to the Estates-General of pre-revolutionary France. These gatherings normally rubberstamped decisions already taken, but they occasionally expressed an independent viewpoint. The last summons of a zemski sobor had occurred in 1684, to ratify a treaty with Poland. So politically active figures in the Russia of 1905 had had little experience in the arts of compromise needed to carry out the October Manifesto’s experiment in self-government.

  Nicholas II himself was by personality and character unsuited to the task of presiding over a transition to the rule of law. Though delegating much responsibility to his ministers, he nonetheless took many key decisions himself. His loyalty to Russia and general decency are not—or should not—be in question. But what of his capacity? His tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote that Nicholas had a good brain and analytical skills, but that he “only grasps the significance of a fact in isolation without its relationship to other facts, events, currents and phenomena.”16 If that deficiency is consistent with a good brain and analytical skills, one shudders to contemplate a mediocre brain. In any event, Pobedonostsev’s comment seems wholly consistent with Nicholas’s almost complete incapacity to address institutional issues, his largely mistaken confidence in his personal relationship with the ordinary Russian, and his refusal to talk an issue through with advisers. To the end he remained blind to the necessities of prioritization, of using a bureaucracy to sift through issues, and of delegating real authority to a person capable—unlike himself—of wielding it systematically and coherently.17

  Despite his issuing the October Manifesto, Nicholas generally resisted genuine reform. In January 1895, while the public still entertained an initial glow of hope for his new reign, some rather conservative landowners active in local self-government had, very deferentially, suggested that he create a formal means for the public to communicate its views to the government. He dismissed their views as “senseless dreams.” He issued the October Manifesto ten years later not because he had recanted his senseless-dreams epithet, or because he believed that Russia and the monarchy would benefit from institutional reforms, but because he saw the manifesto as the only way to defeat the revolution then in progress. To be sure, the regime contained officials dedicated to reform—without them the October Manifesto could not have been issued at all. But the tsar himself and the conservative rural landowners who were his main base of support saw no affirmative good in the institutions launched by the manifesto.

  In recognizing Maklakov’s position at the center of the political center, we’ve already seen the wide divergence between Kadets and Octobrists. But the members of those parties were the relative moderates. On their left stood self-proclaimed revolutionaries who boycotted the first set of legislative elections, and some of whom favored or practiced terror. On the moderates’ right were fans of absolute monarchy, overlapping heavily with ardent anti-Semites, ready and often able to launch pogroms. Both extremes were unlikely to help develop the rule of law.

  Nor was the mindset of the population hospitable to rule of law values. The peasants, the vast majority of the population, held virtually no formal rights but were subject to an array of obligations, including a duty, like the old French corvée, to perform the scut work needed to provide local services, such as road maintenance. Instead of rights, they had a vaguely conceived expectation that the state would somehow provide enough land for them to scratch out a living. People with such an expectation could hardly look favorably on the legal property rights of “landowners”—those from whom additional land might be drawn. (Historians use the term landowners only for non-peasant landowners; though peasants held about three times as much land as did the “landowners,”18 their rights in most of that were too squishy to be called property rights.) With peasants’ rights so limited, it’s natural that their maxims relating to the law were generally negative, as, for example, “If only all laws disappeared, then people would live justly.”19

  Indeed, property rights themselves enjoyed little respect. In the West property rights could be seen as a source of independence and thus of a capacity to resist overbearing monarchs and the state itself. In Russia, by contrast, they were associated with the claims and interests of landowners, who had for centuries been dependent on the monarch to keep their serfs under control. There, property rights had no such luster as in the West.20

  But the peasants had no monopoly on hostility to others’ rights. One of Maklakov’s sparring partners in the Duma, an arch-reactionary whom we’ll encounter quite often, Nikolai Evgenevich Markov (known as Markov II), told Maklakov that “the gentry were enthusiastic about the nationalization of factories while resisting compulsory alienation of lands for the peasants. The industrialists had no objection to taking the gentry’s land, and the peasants of course wanted it.” Markov went so far as to tell Maklakov in the spring of 1907 that he anticipated revolution with pleasure, because it, in his opinion, would destroy what was evil in Russia—the bourgeoisie and capital. Another conservative contemporary, General Alexander Kireev, regarded Russians as prone to lurching from one extreme to another. Only “culture,” which he thought Russians lacked, “enabled people to see two sides of an issue and respect alternative points of view.”21

  These attitudes seem intertwined with the weakness of Russia’s market economy. Markets rely on the rule of law: without some protection of contract and property rights from government and other possible predators, market relationships are riskier and more costly (and thus more rare). And markets nurture the rule of law: people operating in markets learn to compromise, to work out mutually beneficial transactions that recognize ot
hers’ rights.

  While not only industry but also markets had grown in Russia since the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a good deal of this was hothouse development driven by government (most dramatically in the case of the railways). Russia seemed to want the brawn of Western development without accepting the brains—the West’s institutional infrastructure and mindset.22 Market-friendly behavior and attitudes seemed not to jibe with Russianness. Russia’s corporate founders and managers consisted disproportionately of tiny minorities, such as Jews and Russians of German ancestry. Even business leaders who were ethnically Russian and relatively independent of government, such as the Moscow merchants, were surprisingly devoted to the autocracy. And while Great Britain, France, and the states making up the United States had by the middle of the nineteenth century allowed individuals to enter business via corporations simply through filing routine papers, no such option ever existed in imperial Russia. There, corporations could be formed only at the discretion of officials, a rich opportunity for cronyism and bribery and a source of delay and expense.23

  Government censorship, though disorganized and often ineffective,24 posed a threat. In Maklakov’s opinion it drove many reformist thinkers to avoid wrestling with structure or policy in Russia and instead to pen rather abstract comments on political issues in Western Europe. Until the October Manifesto they had little to gain by sober consideration of practical constitutional variations in the Russian context, especially as there had been no legislative body to take action. Maklakov quoted Bismarck’s remark that nothing corrupts a party so much as a long time out of power. Having little prospect of acquiring power, such a party is little inhibited from making extreme criticisms or frivolous promises. So, too, he argued, for Russian intellectuals.25

  Even Russia’s literary elite had little regard for the rule of law. The most obvious example is Leo Tolstoy, a friend of Maklakov since the latter’s college days, who at least purported to condemn all state coercion equally and to regard qualitative distinctions between governments as pointless or even dangerous. To characterize one government as “better” than another would be to offer an implicit justification of the unjustifiable.26 Other Russian writers and intellectuals joined Tolstoy in measuring courts, lawyers, and the law itself against their ideas of perfect morality and perfect truth, rather than seeing them as a set of human institutions with some prospect of making the human institution of which they were a part—the state—less dangerous to morality and truth and more helpful to human flourishing. Thus Alexander II’s judicial reform of 1864, a radical step toward creation of an independent judiciary and private bar, earned him no credit among Russia’s foremost literary figures. Their disdain for the reform may account for some of the inroads into judicial independence that occurred after 1864.27

  The weakness of civil society had implications for an aspect of the rule of law distinct from constraints on the executive, an aspect that Maklakov consistently pressed—achievement of the “order” in ordered liberty. Protection from executive arbitrariness is of limited value if, where government is inactive or ineffective, people lack the skills to work out their conflicts peaceably, through private negotiation or local political institutions, and have no ingrained resistance to rule by violence. The market’s embryonic character meant that capacity for private negotiation was underdeveloped; and the central government’s limits on the representativeness and authority of local government bodies (notably, the zemstvos), and its discretionary interference with their decisions, stunted their capacity. The fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917 and its replacement by a relatively inexperienced provisional government of contested legitimacy left a gap—to be filled, in many cases, with polemics, violence, and the threat of violence.

  That said, the early years of the twentieth century saw rapid change in both the economy and attitudes. Elements of civil society—voluntary associations of every kind; a harassed but largely independent press; independent businesses and unions; groups who, though in competition, were able to negotiate their differences so long as the state kept its hands off—were beginning to thrive.28 Bit by bit Russians were acquiring the experience essential to liberal democracy.

  In an environment so uninviting for the rule of law, the question is less why Maklakov failed to achieve his ultimate goals than how he was able to make any progress at all—and I’ll show that he did. The question on which he focused, how a liberal democracy can grow out of an autocracy, and the related question of nurturing the wellsprings of a productive economy where producers are motivated to create goods or services for voluntary purchase have been the subject of many recent books, such as North, Wallis, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders; Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay; Acemoğlu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail; Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy; and McCloskey’s trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality.29 This book is informed by their insights, but follows Tip O’Neill’s maxim that all politics is local. Russia before the revolution had much in common with all autocracies, but with a Russian flavor. My hope is that a look at one individual’s efforts—themselves informed by ideas at least overlapping with many current notions of evolution toward liberal democracy—can enrich our understanding of such evolution.

  Although I read Maklakov’s story as shedding light on the process of reform toward the rule of law and constitutionalism more broadly, this book is not a handbook—it’s not a how-to-do-it guide nor even a tidy list of steps not to take. My far more modest aim is to tell the story for its own sake and with a view to helping us understand what reformers around the world face today—living under regimes that deny their citizens basic liberties. In the past decade we have seen so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet space and the Arab Spring stretching from Tunisia to the Middle East removing old authoritarians but failing to replace them with liberal democracy. While Maklakov’s story may make much of that shortfall seem natural, it may also provide grounds for hope that comparable figures will arise and have greater luck finding allies and forcing authoritarian retreat.

  * By the Western, or Gregorian, calendar, the revolution took place on November 7, 1917, which by the Julian calendar (Old Style, or O.S.) was October 25; hence, the “October Revolution.” I will use Old Style indications for events that occurred before January 1918, in part because many of them became known by their dates under the Julian calendar.

  I. Origins of a Public Figure

  CHAPTER 1

  Scapegrace and Scholar

  VASILY MAKLAKOV’S CHARACTER and thinking resist easy pigeonholing and perhaps stem from his family’s social and intellectual diversity. His mother, born Elizaveta Cheredeeva, was from a fairly wealthy and aristocratic family and was devoutly religious. His father, Alexei Maklakov, a “self-made man”—in his memoirs Maklakov uses the English expression1—was a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and a doctor at the Moscow Eye Clinic (and for some purposes, at least, its de facto director).

  The parents’ ancestors and relatives combined distinction with a touch of eccentricity. Vasily’s maternal great-grandfather, an official with the civilian rank equivalent to a general, had three daughters, one of them Vasily’s grandmother. Vasily knew her far less well than her sisters, as she died relatively young. One of the sisters, Vasily’s great-aunt Raisa, was married to a soldier, who in the era when Maklakov knew him was a retired colonel spending all his evenings playing cards at the English Club. They had eighteen children, half of them with one patronymic, half with another—a phenomenon that Maklakov found unintelligible at the time (and evidently still did in his 80s, when describing it in his memoirs).2 The other great-aunt, Mariia, never married. She lived on land that would have been very valuable if she had not given part of it to a church and if a railroad track had not prevented her from getting from her house to the rest of the property except by a roundabout route. This was no problem for her, as she never left her house. Sh
e rose at five in the afternoon and mainly enjoyed the company of other old ladies who played cards and read religious books to her. Maklakov, as her godson, had to go there for supper weekly until her death.

  Some historians have suggested that Maklakov’s opinions were a product of his class origins; one, for example, says that he was one of a number of “great landowners” among the Kadets.3 That was indeed the background of many Kadet leaders, but not of Maklakov. In his memoirs he took some pains to explain that on his mother’s side (the one with money), the original wealth came from salaries. Though her forebears owned small estates in the vicinity of Moscow, that ownership entitled them to very little peasant labor in the days before the serfs’ emancipation, so emancipation itself inflicted no loss on them. Although Maklakov was technically a landowner because of land in Zvenigorod that his father had acquired for weekend and summer relaxation, the land occasioned expense and of course pleasure—but no income.4